ProPublica

About the Project

ProPublica continued to innovate online, never losing sight of our mission to use investigative journalism to hold power to account. Some highlights:

Our ELECTIONLAND project was the largest ever journalistic collaboration around a single event, with some 1,100 journalists taking part in a nationwide effort to cover voting rights, election administration, and whether the 2016 election was “rigged.”

Building on what we learned with Electionland, we launched DOCUMENTING HATE with a similar group of journalism partners, this time to collect data on hate crimes and bias incidents nationwide. With effectively no good national data on the subject, this effort is a fledgling attempt to bring facts to bear on the issue. Our work in building and leading these collaboration is a hallmark of a new era of collaborative journalism, of which ProPublica is a pioneer.

We honed our data journalism work, focusing especially on external services like APIs and our DATA STORE, which helps enable other newsrooms to cover vital topics like campaign finance, healthcare and national legislation.

Our engagement team broke new ground in pulling our readers into our stories with our MATERNAL MORTALITY project, and with BREAKING THE BLACK BOX created tools that helped readers understand complicated technologies.

Our quantitative investigation into CAR INSURANCE rates showed that some major insurers charge minority neighborhoods as much as 30 percent more than other areas with similar accident costs. It was the latest in a beat we’ve been on for a while — scrutinizing the algorithms that exert an often hidden control over our lives.

We covered New York City with investigative data journalism, finding in our RENT RACKET series that landlords were all too often receiving tax breaks to provide rent breaks that they weren’t actually providing.

Our work on the TRUMP ADMINISTRATION has also stood out. We’ve repeatedly done revelatory stories on Trump’s conflicts and unkept promises. And we’ve done them in new ways, from quick turnaround tweetstorms, to collaborating with readers to find White House financial disclosure forms.